


Madness x Masochism

by goodnightfern



Series: The Extended MCU [1]
Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Gen, Hisoka's Worst Lay, Meteor City's Collectivist Culture and Suicide Bomber Cult, Murder, Offscreen Dubious Consent, Original Religious Lore, Piss Drinking but in a Survivalist Context not a Kink Context, Religious Fanaticism, The Ethics of Sharks, child endangerment, don't take the dubcon too seriously qworfo just lies back and thinks of meteor city the whole time, the 2011 anime is wrong togashi said qwo cant drive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:35:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28396260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodnightfern/pseuds/goodnightfern
Summary: Kill the body and the head will die.(Devoid of his nen, Chrollo wanders the desert.)
Relationships: Hisoka/Kuroro Lucifer | Chrollo Lucifer, Kuroro Lucifer | Chrollo Lucifer/Pakunoda
Series: The Extended MCU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2126208
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	Madness x Masochism

**Author's Note:**

> yes, i did a helluva lot of MC worldbuilding to the point where i may as well scratch off the serial numbers someday. i wrote this for myself, the ship tags are also just for Myself. just trying to get back in his bizarre headspace, here, having fun.
> 
> also: deadass: in the manga chrollo picked up a homeless dude in the park to drive the car for picking up neon they are in the BACKSEAT there's an entire MISSING SCENE IN THE ANIME wherein qworfo took this homeless guy out for a suit fitting and they definitely posed in the mirror and did a whole montage. 2011 animators get on my level

* * *

At first he is furious.

Pakunoda betrayed the Spider. Broke the rule he hammered into their skulls: we are more than the sum of our parts, we are more than our flesh and blood, we do not know when the meteor may land but may it land on himself rather than the rest of them -

Yet he knows, deep down, she always would have made that choice.

A rebellious, near blasphemous rage rises at the cruelty of fate he squashes back down. Here is fate: the prophecy warned him he’d stand alone at the end. East it is. He has a soul to recover.

As for Pakunoda…

If she is not the Boss of the Spider now, perhaps Feitan. Phinks and Franklin aren’t ones for control, and Nobunaga might strive but ultimately fail. Machi is too independently minded to lead, and the others are still children.

The Spider is lost to him. All that remains is to recover his soul and return home.

Where he belongs.

The sunrise turns this foreign desert lurid colors so unlike the haze that clings to the Backback. He stands up, thinks to slide down the cliff, but a sharp twist in his heart sends him collapsing back down. Turning his third eye inward leads to another jerk. Even examining his own soul is lost to him.

Healers and elders alike have wondered before if some specific organ housed the soul. In the past they believed the brain, hence the curse of tremors when consumed. Current theology is that the soul is in all parts of the body, blood and nerves and bone alike. Can it truly be the heart? One singular organ?

What could a Kurta possibly know of the mysteries of Meteor City? How could it claim an individual out of the sacred collective? Clearly it practices some blasphemous dark arts, just like the rest of its wretched clan. The Catholics speak of demons but Chrollo knows evil walks in human forms. He forced it out of them that night: in their entrails, in their eyeballs, in their screams.

Perhaps the historical bond gave the Kurta such power. As they violated the law of the collective before, so the survivor repeats the sins of his ancestors. But did Chrollo’s actions not restore the balance?

Does this soulcatcher stand in blasphemy himself?

The sun is fully up, bright and cruel. His feathers cling to his skin. Gingerly he stands, considers the length and slope of the cliff before him.

No jumping, no floating feet, no teleportation available. This will be utterly graceless.

He braces his boots and slips down at a more lenient grade. When it steepens he latches his fingers on a scrape of rock, scrambles to brace a foot on a ledge. Breathes, in and out, until it evens. When his heart quivers he wonders just how much he’s relied on his soul all his life, holds his breath until it pulses again.

Loses his grips and slides down further.

Scraping and bleeding this time. Fumbling for some kind of handhold - there, he’s got it - not for long, gravity tugs and his fingernails tear until his foot catches on something - only for a moment. Not long enough to catch his breath.

By the time he hits bottom he is a battered husk spitting rocks and blood and his own poisoned knife has stuck him. For two hours he lies paralyzed. Enough time to catalogue his injuries: some broken ribs. Half his fingernails torn off and bloody. The shattered remains of his phone under his left hip, multiple stabs and scrapes from the various implements hidden in his coat. Once he can start to twitch he realizes his left ankle is twisted wrong. He slakes his thirst on his own blood and in another half-hour he can bring himself to his knees, stand on shaky legs and collapse again.

He’s had his soul for as long as he can remember. Ever since his arrival - not quite three years old as the elders say it. How did this husk function before?

By crawling and waddling like the sepolian beasts who roam this land.

The morning sun to his face, he sets off down the canyon. Clinging to the walls, keeping to the shadows. Here he can almost imagine he is not alone, that the scurries of rocks are the vibrations of his siblings.

At least he isn't completely alone. Birds and kangaroo rats are too fast for the soulless to catch, but a wandering green-gleaming beetle trundles slowly by.

Compared to his homeland this desert is a jungle. He can drink his own urine until he finds a water source - which there must be, given how many cacti and brambles there are. Out here the water will be clean and free of pollution; no blessing required to drink.

Days pass in a fugue. Without his soul even everyday things like pain and hunger drive him to collapse. Sleep comes when it comes. Piss in his palm and his own blood wet his throat. A colony of fat black ants provides a feast. One shadowy corner of rock seeps water and clay. One moonlit night a kangaroo rat teaches him to suckle a cactus. It leaves fuzzy spines in his tongue. His killing coat turns bedraggled, sodden with his own sweat and blood. The soles of his boots start to peel.

All told it is seven days until he finds the straight paved line headed east through the desert. A sign promises this is the 15 - a straight shot east to Los Diablos. A growing speck raises dust at the horizon; he collapses on the side of the road and waits.

The first driver is not charitable. Briefly slows, considers, and speeds onward.

Three hours pass.

The second driver fancies themselves a Samaritan. The engine stops. Two worried voices - “Daddy, is he dead?” “Hold on, sweetie, stay in the car -” and someone is turning him over, leaning close. Closer, closer, as the skewer up his sleeve slips into his wrist -

Right in the eardrum. Got it in one. Takes more force than usual, though, and the hand clutching his shoulder tries to reach for his throat. Though the man is bigger and stronger than Chrollo he’s clearly no killer. As if strangling is that easy.

The stranger dies slumped against the bumper.

Chrollo makes quick work of his possessions. A thin jacket complete with a wallet, keys, and a phone. A strange black shirt boasting of some sportsball team’s victory that hangs loose but hides the blood. Pants much too long he folds up around the ankles. White sneakers two sizes too big - the corpse keeps those. Chrollo puts on the corpse’s sunglasses, scrapes his hair down and shoves the baseball cap down over his tattoo.

The corpse is nearly too heavy for him to lift. Nevermind, it can stay in the road. He enters the car and considers the steering wheel.

“Excuse me,” he asks the screaming child in the backseat, “do you know how to drive?”

The child is too upset to answer, thrashing against the strange cage it’s buckled into.

Driving shouldn’t be too hard. The wandering witness he found in Yorknew surely could do it, and he’s sat in the passenger seat alongside Phinks and Machi plenty of times. The keys go in, the lever gets pulled - not that one, that one squirts water, but this one, and nothing happens.

There’s a bunch of letters by the lever. P for…. Position. N for No. D for drive?

Still nothing.

Perhaps the wrong pedal? There’s three - one on the far right that makes the car lurch and freeze, and two more. He hits the biggest one first and gets nothing. The little one, the leftmost, works.

The car lurches and jerks over the corpse of the previous owner, but it’s moving.

He drives at a crawl at first. Presses the pedal harder until the desert whizzes by and he feels like he has his soul again. It’s rather frightening, so he presses the larger pedal and slams his forehead into the wheel. All the while the child wails and wails and wails.

“I’m sorry,” he tells it. “Do you know how close we are to Los Diablos? We can walk instead. You can walk, right?”

No reply.

Surely the parent had something here to comfort the child. In the trunk he finds an ice chest brimming with bounty. He unwraps the bigger sandwich for himself, eats it thoughtlessly. Takes a placid slip of water and regains control of his faculties. Plucks another sandwich - smaller with colorful smears inside, clearly meant for the child, and slides in the backseat.

The child shudders, stares at him with red-stained cheeks. Chrollo reaches for its third eye on instinct, sighs and hands it the food instead.

“Calm yourself and eat,” Chrollo tells it.

“Where’s Daddy?”

“Dead. You’ll die yourself if you disobey me. Calm down, now, and eat.”

It urinates and screams when he tries to touch it. He tries gentler tactics, soothing, making promises he intends to fulfill. There is a better place he can send this child to. Where it will be loved and cared for and raised properly. But this soulless soulcatcher can’t even perform his most basic duty, and Chrollo has bigger concerns at the moment. He returns to the drivers seat boiling in shame.

He knows the horrors of sepolian childrearing, but this pitiful thing is a far cry from those bright little souls he met in Yorknew. It wants its Mommy. It wants its Daddy. It does not work, it knows nothing of its own soul, and it has zero sense of duty beyond its own base desires. He tells it a story, a filtered version of an ancient story he first memorized and preached in the wellspaces when he was not much older than it.

The child does not appreciate the tale of the first martyr. How do wandering witnesses do it? In his previous role he only dealt with outsiders after the journey, after the first death that awakens the soul. The only way he can proceed is to throw it in the first dumpster he finds: tucked behind a service station boasting a massive saurian statue.

In his current frustration he isn’t up to killing the cashier. The wallet is full of jenny he can exchange for a waterbottle, a plush replica of the dinosaur statue, and a bag of cookies.

“I’m doing you a favor, little one,” he tells the child, placing it carefully in the dumpster along with its gifts. “May you find eternal life in the wells of Meteor City.”

He slams the lid of the dumpster shut and offers a prayer to the meteor.

By the time the car gives up and dies for no discernable reason Los Diablos rises up like a mirage at the horizon. At least he has his bearings now; Chrollo knows this city all too well. An alien monument to decadence and sin, where the pigs go to waste billions of jenny on lies and pump their seed in painted whores. His killing coat is stuffed safely in the dead man’s old backpack - along with one of those flat computers only Shalnark can work - but it has been stained with the blood of these sinners many a time. He tilts his head back like a tourist in front of the gold-gleaming Drumpf Tower. To think the Boss of the Spider once carved a bloody trail up all fifty floors of it, his legs at his side.

If he gives into memories he will quickly despair. He has traveled east, and the ones he needs are here.

Even here in this toxic hellbroth of humanity something pure nestles within. At the elder’s last tally there were a dozen wandering witnesses accounted for. They will be found where all the lost are: sleeping in the tent cities, shuffling outside any homeless shelter, idling in any public park. Off the main strip of the city, he wanders, waits for the casinos to get shabbier and the motels to get cheaper, till he reaches the province of shotgun shacks and liquor stores where the humble workers who power this city reside. Now all he must do is -

A sudden stab in the heart shocks him.

He cannot see souls anymore.

The collective of Meteor City is an easy thing to spot for those who know where to look. Wandering witnesses in their meager communes always exhibit the same grey miasma. Every color of the spectrum mixed and muted.

For a moment he forgets how to walk again.

He blinks. Regains composure. He is in an alleyway between a streetcorner and a convenience store that promises gambling opportunities inside. He is a dead thing surrounded by walking corpses, but his feet still carry him. A shivering addict does not recognize him. Nor do a copse of humans loitering outside the convenience store. He crosses a street dodging cars that don’t stop for him and sees a church that promises hot food, every day, to anyone.

Chrollo closes his eyes and breathes in safety. Sinners the Sikhs may be, at least they are people of faith. Witnesses often melt into congregations.

Someone will find him. The church boasts a small courtyard, a few fruit trees and cacti around a fountain. A bench he can lie down on and sleep, ignoring anyone who tries to speak to him.

Until he is awakened with a gentle touch and a whispered, “Brother?”

He opens his eyes and sits up immediately.

His sibling is disguised as one of the faith. A small woman, chunni draped and twisted to cover her lips as well as her hair. Unused to clean air, or else to hide some obvious mutilation, Chrollo does not question. He reaches for her blindly, pressing his palms desperately to hers, but even the sacred greeting is lost to him. It turns into an embrace, his sunglasses off and hat askew, and she cards her fingers through his hair to see his holy mark.

“Soulcatcher,” she sighs. “What has happened to you? I see a bound soul, a poison blade. You are severed, my sibling. How is it possible?”

“I don’t know. Someone - one of our enemies did this to me.” He draws back, wipes his nose. She dries his tears with her chunni, sits beside him with an arm around as if she can restore their eternal bond.

“You make too many,” she chides. “I know you walk the path of destruction…”

“All of them are our enemies,” he tells her bitterly. “I walk the path of the Spider. But it’s not too late yet. I’m following a prophecy,” he explains. “I was instructed to walk east. To meet you and your siblings here. You and your witnesses - you can restore me, yes?”

“Surely,” she says, but there is a tinge of doubt. “But - may I address you as an individual?”

Chrollo nods.

“Then you know as well as I, Chrollo. There is only one who has ever severed the bonds of our city. How is this possible? Who did this to you?”

He sighs. There is no use hiding from his people. “One of the Kurtas survived.”

“And now you suffer its judgment.”

“Only the elders and my people may judge me. That thing held no right. Did I not stand in the debates? Have I not lost enough? Sister, you must -”

“Chrollo, my shard, listen to me.” She grips him tight, meets his eyes plainly. “My faith in you never wavered. Not once.”

May the meteor burn Los Diablos, he is saved.

Wandering witnesses, like the Spider, are granted certain leniency in order to fulfill their duties in the outside world. This dozen shares a piece of personal property, a lot with two trailers parked on it. When his sister - Left-Claw, but she goes by Keerat in the sepolian land - signals with her aura they slowly convene. Three are volunteering with Catholic institutions. Three more labor at an LGBTQ youth center. Two turn up in dirty white aprons stained from dishwashing shifts - the collection of currency is necessary to preserve them - and the rest are disguised as typical sepolian vagrants.

The greetings and embraces are tender and shy. Someone begins cooking a pot of gruel, another prepares tea - from home, they promise, ash-black with a touch of red clay. A rare sprinkle of that most precious spice, the ground bones of the elders.

Chrollo’s heart beats steadily against the chain. He sips his tea crosslegged in the cramped trailer, utterly content as they lay hands on him. Though he cannot see or feel it he knows the miasma soaks him, a warm bath of eternal acceptance and love. Their voices rise and merge, overlapping.

It might be minutes, it might be hours until they withdraw.

Nothing is changed. The chain remains.

“We can try again,” someone says. “Eight hours.”

“Eight days and eight nights,” another adds. “A full meditation.”

“If it was truly a Kurta…”

“Do not speak that name," the soulcatcher hisses. Those demons are dead.”

“Do you deny the consequence of your actions, Chrollo? This survivor -"

“You speak near blasphemy, Fender,” Left-Claw interrupts. “How dare you question our elders?”

How dare anyone indeed. As for the business with the Kurtas: they started it, and despite this misstep Meteor City shall finish it.

“Silence. This one shall not cause discord within your midst.” Chrollo stands up, shakes them off. Drinks the dregs of his tea gone cold. “Any of you who were present among the debates knows this one’s sin. Acts of individuality, the denial of sacrifice - how could the collective heal this punishment?”

In his heart, he knows: the Kurta, as well as he himself, know more of nen than his simple brethren do of the soul. The abilities he’s stolen and developed in his legs are all singular in nature. The specifics of his book even take this into account - as a soulcatcher he is more versed in collective than individual nen. As such, he is nothing without others. Only a series of blank pages anyone might write on.

What is he now, if even his siblings cannot touch him?

The witnesses protest, grasp for him as he stumbles through the door, misses a step, and falls to the dusty lot on his hands and knees.

Base, scrabbling corpse.

No. Now is not time to despair. Now is the time to drag himself up. Now is the time to put his Benz knife to the throat of the first lone passerby he sees, drag them back down the alley from whence he came and throw them down and stomp them, break their kneecaps under his boots and keep going, keep crushing, ribs and throat and skull until he breaks through and reaches putrid brain matter.

A witness. He rounds on the shaking civilian. Dialing the police, very cute. When it screams he punches a hand down her throat and while tongue-pulling is a favorite way to shut something up his hands cannot transform into claws anymore so he settles for picking it up and slamming it against a wall, knocking it once, twice, again until it slumps and he can straddle it and strangle it.

If he is to be a beast let him slay like one.

He slides down next to his corpses and breathes. Out here on the edges of Los Diablos only those too low for the mafia might slink through here. Two years ago the Spider made a name for themselves among the local families. All anyone has to do is see his tattoo, now that he’s known. He traces it with his fingers. Remembers who he is. Stares at the corpses, fat tongues and purple throats, grey on red on matted hair, and inhales the stench of their bowels.

This is the path of destruction. This is who he is: beloved of his people and a bogeyman to the rest.

So Hisoka finds him: wandering the streets of Los Diablos, lurid neon lights painting the blood on his skin.

“How the mighty fall,” he tsks. “How are you even upright?”

Chrollo stares down at his useless feet. That bad ankle is indeed quite swollen. He lifts his chin, defiant to his Judas, and tries to pass him by.

“Hey - wait - Chrollo, I’ve been in contact with the rest.”

The charlatan dares to touch him and that is why Chrollo whirls on his heel to face him. “How? You were false all along. I suspected you, you know. Even when you played along. The moment you refused my own tattoo I knew you were false. Machi never trusted you -”

“I’ve been talking to Machi. Don’t you know Pakunoda’s dead? They know everything, Chrollo. I’ve been trying to reach you for days.”

No.

Hisoka is lying again.

Even if Pakunoda wavered, she would not sacrifice her life for Chrollo’s. Their ancient sin, the kiss of exclusive intimacy, is long forgotten. She is a crucial founding member of the Spider, she alone could carry his legacy like no one else. She should have left him to die or else expect to find him back home should he fulfill his prophecy.

Should have being the key term.

Was that her sacred choice? Her personal martyrdom? By the bones of the elders, he taught her to value her individuality. He cannot define the sudden rotten feeling in his stomach nor why the lights of this city are too much for him to process. He sees the dizzying light of the catacombs, he sees her angular nose in the moonlight, he sees her as a child cradling the cat she brought to Meteor City with her. The same animal she slew beneath his own hand while he whispered proverbs in her ear, to value the animal over the human is blasphemy, to hoard food from the collective is unspeakable, she will consume as surely as she consumes the flesh of the sacrifice, and he does not know where he is anymore.

In a hotel room. Penthouse suite. A room exactly like any other he’s butchered some wealthy pig in, on the toilet seat looking at a massive marbled counter. A sink deep enough to drown a CEO in.

Drump Tower? The Luxor Pyramid? The Bergamo? They all look the same. There is a pink-foamed bubble bath and an assortment of candles, and Hisoka’s voice outside the door.

He gathers himself and opens the door only a crack. Hisoka is in civilian attire, flirting with the young maid bearing a room service cart. Hisoka is licking her neck, she is bright red and fumbling, and when those yellow eyes find him he shuts the door.

Let Hisoka play his perverse games. He eyes the bathtub and wonders if he’s meant to use it. He washes his killing coat and his own jeans, combs out the feathers and blow-dries them, but a damp washcloth is enough to clean the blood off him.

When the noises subside he ventures out to see exactly what he expected: the teenage maid fucked out and dead, Hisoka lounging like a lion beside the corpse.

"Dispose of that," he orders idly, eyeing the room service cart. Hisoka seems to have ordered enough for the entire Spider. He picks up a lobster tail, fluffy inside its red carapace. "Did you know these are a relative of the cockroach?"

Meatier, though. With a much harder carapace. Hisoka rolls the girl up in the sheets and off the bed. From the windows of the suite they appear quite high up. Should be easy to toss her off and turn this slaying into a tragic suicide.

"Darling, there's forks," Hisoka says instead of replying to his suggestion. He slinks up behind Chrollo, a hand sliding around his waist. "Did you bathe at all?"

Fine. He'll do it. Setting the half-eaten lobster down he shies from Hisoka's touch. Unrolls the corpse and drags it to the balcony and freezes.

Slowly is reeled in by Hisoka's ability.

"Let me go."

"You're a mess, Boss," Hisoka breathes in his ear. "Hush, nevermind the girl. Let me tend to you."

"Let me go."

"Tsk, tsk, Boss. I'm the one giving orders now. And as much as I love your resistance… which one of us is the nen user, hmm?"

Bungee Gum seals his lips.

Hisoka is not interested in broken toys by his own claim. Chrollo knows he only delights in breaking.

This will not break him: being gently forced naked and into the tub, actually submerged in unholy waters, having his hair scrubbed and his back washed while Hisoka hums discordant tunes. He suppresses a wince when Hisoka devotes too much energy to his genitalia. He knows Hisoka plays games of petty lust. Sepolian folk are weak in this matter of flesh.

Afterwards he is laid out on fluffy towels on the bed while Hisoka simpers over his injuries. Having experimented in the pain tolerance of humans before, Chrollo knows how to grimace and wince when Hisoka wrenches his ankle in place.

Hisoka smirks and twists again.

"Don't play coy, Boss," he says, the title dripping revulsion. "You've been walking on that for how long, now?"

The mortal vessel is but a house for the soul. Should it crack, his fellow shards will restore it. Should it break, his shards will restore others. So the elders tell and so Chrollo knows.

Hisoka has never been to Meteor City. Chrollo could tell him that when outsiders first experience the collective aura they fall screaming as if they've been skinned. That at age six he once got crushed beneath a tower of automobiles and it took hours to be found and recovered, three days under the healers to restore himself, and then the elders taught him how to punch up with his soul and move mountains of steel.

That when they were teens he let Feitan inflict all manner of torments on him to slake his thirst.

He says nothing and watches Hisoka's eyes narrow and darken. Imagining all sorts of tortures, no doubt.

Hisoka has been teasing and tormenting Chrollo for years trying to see his insides. Still he has no idea who Chrollo is.

"Can't even look me in the eye?" Hisoka croons, and Chrollo sighs and opens his eyes.

Hisoka's body is arched over him. A knee between his thighs, one hand holding him up and one on his own hip.

"I'm not participating in your profanity," Chrollo tells him, and scoots up the bed and away from him. No gum stops him from getting up this time, or plucking the dead man's pants off the floor.

"You can't hide your desires from me, Chrollo."

"What I desire from you is updates on my Spider." A pause as he remembers: "I found a new computer for Shalnark, by the way. Should be in the backpack."

Hisoka allows him to return to his lobster tail and his task. He slides open the door, tail wedged between his teeth as he drags the corpse outside and hefts it over the rail. Takes it out and takes a bite while he watches it fall.

When given the opportunity he enjoys watching humans fall from great heights. His mind takes flight with them. Sometimes, when he had a soul to protect his vessel, he'd jump over with them. There are so many different ways they might splatter.

He hangs his head over the railing and imagines.

Why not do it now?

His soul is trapped. His people cannot save him. His Spider…

All that falls are his tears.

Hisoka’s presence behind him. The clown is still nude, still erect. He wants to do unspeakable acts to Chrollo’s vessel. Quid pro quo. Information on his loved ones if his lust is satisfied.

Chrollo thinks -

The soulcatcher weeps -

The Boss of the Spider turns and says, “Is that all it takes? A simple molestation? I hardly see how the exchange is equivalent. Do what you will to this one.”

Does he blaspheme? Does he sin? Or will this death be nothing compared to his current situation? Or is he staying true to the iron laws he set himself, as passed down from the ancient law: preserve the collective, no matter what it takes.

His Spider is yearning for him as much as he yearns for them.

“Oh, darling,” Hisoka leers, sticky-sweet breath a fog. “You know just how to get me going.”

If there is one sure thing he knows: Hisoka must die.

Chrollo leaves in the middle of the night. His back is raked with claws. His thighs are bloody. His soul aches. But Shalnark says Greed Island is a real place crowded with powerful nen users, and his killing coat is clean.

An island just off the Yorbian continent.

East it is.

**Author's Note:**

> i also have an oreopapi wip thats like.... post black whale canon divergence of my own fanon? happy end of 2021, folks.


End file.
